In high anxiety a mr. Mcguffen keeps dr. Thorndyke from staying on a bottom floor and making him stay on a high floor thus making him confront his fear of heights he might have well been called mr. plot device
A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies -I thought it was an air dummy, but I do get my lines crossed. I wondered what the shadow figure represents for you can you cast if off? U.S. Const. amend. IV & Abend v. MCA, Inc., 863 F.2d 1465 (9th Cir. 1988), aff'd sub nom. Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207, 110 S. Ct. 1750, 109 L. Ed. 2d 184 (1990)
Well, For him(not to be confuse with lucas) a Macguffin is just a thing everyone want but what it is, doesn't really matter to us. It's doesn't have anything else to do with the plot rather than set it in motion.
A device to trap lions in Scotland. But there are not lions in Scotland. Then that's no McGuffin. It means the McGuffin is a non-thing, it's something the writer makes up. The plans for the Death Star or the Maltese Falcon, the brief case which we never see what is in it from Pulp Fiction, it's something to chase and fight over in a movie.
Yes. A MacGuffin is something in a story that motivates a character to fulfill elements of the plot, and exists only for that reason. It's never examined or explained, or questioned and revealed to be false or insignificant. It's accepted, within the story, as legitimate for the sake of the plot. The joke was that the guy was questioning it, and when he revealed it as being fake, the other guy then pointed out that, because of that, it's not a McGuffin.
The joke is that by them calling out a purpose of the object it's no longer a MacGuffin because in a story about a MacGuffin it isn't used in the plot, it only exists to drive conflict, it has no purpose in and of itself. For example in a heist movie the keycard the crew is trying to steal to get into the vault isn't a MacGuffin. In No Country For Old Men the breifcase is a MacGuffin. The objects you need to advance the plot (often used by JJ Abrams), especially when they are one after the other, some people call a MacMuffin because they are like a MacGuffin but usually are bad for your script and are used just to fatten it up.
